A somewhat rose-tinted view of MySpace’s code heritage
Posted by: Ben in Techy Musings, tags: social software
MySpace. Home to some of the greatest user-created eyesores on the Internet. Inflictor of immeasurable pain upon web developers employed to shoehorn hacked and mangled code into custom profile layouts—creations of which Dr Frankenstein would be proud. Plagued by reliability problems and exploited by dangerous user-created scripts.
That’s my view of the social network, at least.
On MySpace’s developer site, the long preamble to OpenSocial on the MySpace Developer Platform is a gem of autobiographical prose which presents an entirely different (and patronisingly worded) perspective on MySpace’s code pedigree. A view from the inside, perhaps, where everything we thought MySpace were doing wrong was actually what they were doing right; where the apparently well-deserved repercussions of their shoddy code and lax security were no less than unwarranted assaults on their pioneering social “utopia”.
And a view where MySpace’s inevitable catching-up to Facebook’s well-executed application platform is varnished over with a smug account of how MySpace got there first:
MySpace has a very interesting history with applications written by users. You, gentle reader, may very well have participated in that history.
…
Through a little known technology known as “cut and paste”, users could “install” applications they liked on their own profiles.
There may be more to come here about MySpace’s application platform as I try to develop for it in the near future. If this introduction was supposed to repair relations with developers for whom MySpace has long been a source of mirth, however, it’s had the opposite effect on me.
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